The problem is that certain frequencies get attenuated very quickly, and some others are harmful for human beings. Also creating receivers and transmitters at some frequencies is hard or even impossible with today's technology.
Somehow the tactic does work for Microsoft. They always have a next release just around the corner that is supposed to solve all problems.
Apple doesn't promise anything. It just delivers. Sometime it's something that leaves the whole tech world in shock, sometimes it's a dud. But they're low on fake promises.
If you have something with the specs of the iPad, it looks good, has a lot of software available, is easy to use, and has a user interface that doesn't feel sluggish, I think it would sell like hotcakes.
It just seems nobody has produced this "iPad-killer" yet, so apparently it's hard to do.
What people want most of all, is something that works with the least amount of fuzz.
For example, I bought an iPhone 3GS two years ago, my colleague bought an HTC Hero around the same time. I still get updates, he needs to jailbreak his phone and mess around with custom ROMs to get the newer Android versions.
It's the same with Blizzard. They support their older games for a long time.
Care about your users and they will care about you. The problem with a lot of companies, like Microsoft and HTC, is that their customers are OEMs and telcos, not the users.
In 2000 I bought a Casio Cassiopeia E125 PDA: 150 MHz ARM processor, 32MB RAM, 16MB internal flash, CompactFlash slot so extendable up to 4 GB, 320x240 full color screen, PocketPC 2000 (WinCE 3.0).
I bought it because it had much better specs than the Palm V, which had a monochrome display, 16 Mhz CPU, 2MB RAM or something like that.
A friend of mine did buy the Palm. In the end it was a much better PDA than mine. It had 30x the battery life, it didn't forget all it's settings (including contacts, calender and even password), if the battery died, it had a sync utility that actually worked, and most importantly, it was usable left handed.
I wouldn't even say that Casio did a bad job, except for the battery life the hardware was pretty nice. It was just that MS PocketPC was horrible as a PDA OS, while PalmOS was done very well.
Sure someone ported DOOM and I could run it on my PDA. I could play MP3's and the Palm couldn't. but for actually using it as a PDA the Palm was much much better.
My point is. That except for a few things, like playing MP3s, decoding video, the CPU power and other specs only matter in sofar as they OS isn't tailored to the hardware specs. A well designed OS can outperform a poorly designed one on hardware that has specs only 1/10th.
The Casio E-125 was a very beefy machine in those days, but PocketPC was so poorly designed, and so resource heavy, that it still was a pain to use, while PalmOS was designed for hardware even more limited than the Palm V, and thus ran very smoothly.
It's the last time I bought something on specs alone, without having used it first.
I am old enough to remember. But as far as I'm concerned, Java is a nice language for some serverside tasks, but still horrible for anything that needs to interact with users, unless you completely write your own UI. Swing is horrible, SWT is kind of ok-ish for some office type applications but still limited.
And any Java application I have used, has glitches in the GUI, moments where it just stops responding for a few seconds, laggy responses to user input.
The only user oriented Java application that sofar has been able to impress me is Minecraft.
Radioastronomy needs a lot of CPU power, but compared to other things like the stuff that uses BOINC, it needs a lot of bandwidth.
For example our current LOFAR system handles 200 Gb/s with a 12.000 core BlueGene and a ~3200 core, 200 machine cluster and about 6 PB of storage.
At full resolution we would write 2 PB per 24 hours.
With 2 million BOINC users, it would require an average stream of about 1 Mb/s per user, if each of them is online for 2.4 hours a day.
In other words, it's about the same bandwidth as all torrents in the USA combined (20% of ~1 Tb/s average USA bandwidth)
Yes. We're basically processing the same bandwidth as of all the torrents in the USA. Now we don't have the biggest BlueGene in the world. Much bigger versions have been purchased by customers not disclosed by IBM, but probably in the NSA/CIA/FBI/DHS corner, making at least a few capable of processing the internet in real time.
The BlueGene Stella at LOFAR central processing currently does 37 TFLops, which is about the same as this new Fornax system the article mentions (40 TFlops).
While space based VLBI is certainly cool, and some of the components in RadioAstron were developed at my company, it doesn't compare to the SKA.
The RadioAstron has a 10 m antenna, so about 75 m2 collecting area. The SKA will have a of about 1000000 m2. (square kilometer). The baselines will be up to 6-7000 km long in some possible variants, compared to the 189000km of the Radioastron.
So the spacial resolution might be a bit smaller (7000/189000 = 0.037), but the sensitivity is much lower (75/1000000=0.000075)
And that doesn't take into account that you can have a much larger data connection to a groundbased system, increasing the resolution in time and/or frequency, and the bandwidth you can observe.
That's why if I switch browsers, I'll go to Safari.
For now I'm stuck on Firefox 3.6, as most addons I use are still only available for that version. They are only being updated for newer FF versions for Windows.
FireFox's major selling point are the addons. The new release cycle broke those. Without addons, there is no point in choosing FF over another browser.
I'm still on Firefox 3.6. I've tried updating, but the addons I've been using for the past5 or so years are only being updated for Windows.
I'm using Firefox because it's available on Linux and OSX as well.
The main advantage of Firefox over other browsers are the addons. Break those, and I have no reason to stay with Firefox.
I've been a user of Netscape/Phoenix/Firefox since 1995, hardly ever used anything else, but it looks like I finally have to go looking for another browser.
There are also CS jobs in industry and government. You might need to look for them though, as a lot are more generic programming jobs.
And I'm not talking about a Software Architect position, although someone like that might get to do some CS. I'm talking about someone who's expected to publish in peer reviewed papers. Although you can have a CS job without having to do that.
It's the same here. We usually even speak if the "ICT sector". Just like there are Healthcare, Agriculture, Education, Government, Financial and Industrial sectors. Or there could be an "ICT division" in a bank or R&D department.
In general it's supposed to encompass anything from the guy changing broken disks in the server room, to a telco's sales representative, to the software architect of the Government's new tax system.
Sure it's broad, but that's what you get for dividing the economy into sectors.
What do you think all those neutrino detectors were being built for? It's how you track those FTL ships. Only the military didn't think the CERN people would figure it out as well.
This is not the whole story. I know that at least in Sweden a different rotary phone system was used. With the numbers the other way around or something like that. Memories are from 25+ years ago, so a bit hazy, but I definitely remember being baffled the first time I had to use a Swedish phone.
I also know that early "Adding machines", before cash registers, also used the lowest at the bottom layout. I think it was mechanically easier to build. I still have a 100 year old one here, once used by my grandfather.
I think it's one of the key differences between Apple and MS. To MS the customers are the OEMs and corporate IT departments. To Apple the customers are the actual users.
Neither is perfect, but the difference in focus means I like my Macbook, but my IT department hates Apple's (lack of) support options. For Dell it's the other way around.
No, GPS can't give you an accurate enough time, you need some kind of atomic clock like a hydrogen maser. The GPS signal is influenced too much by the effects the ionosphere and orbital variations of the satellites have on the travel times of the signal. There are ways to compensate for those, but only to get a high accuracy in position, while losing any time accuracy.
With integrated differential dualfrequency GPS measurements you can get to 2-3 cm accuracy. This is routinely done by surveyors, although the equipment isn't cheap ($150k) and the size of a small truck.
For application in radioastronomy even higher accuracy is possible over global ranges in the 10.000+ km range in VLBI. Techniques like that are used to calibrate GPS and measure continental drift to mm accuracy.
I find it highly unlikely that an error of more than 10 cm would have been made here unless someone at some surveyor company made a stupid mistake somewhere.
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The problem is that certain frequencies get attenuated very quickly, and some others are harmful for human beings. Also creating receivers and transmitters at some frequencies is hard or even impossible with today's technology.
In practice you are quite limited.
Somehow the tactic does work for Microsoft. They always have a next release just around the corner that is supposed to solve all problems.
Apple doesn't promise anything. It just delivers. Sometime it's something that leaves the whole tech world in shock, sometimes it's a dud. But they're low on fake promises.
I think most people couldn't care less.
If you have something with the specs of the iPad, it looks good, has a lot of software available, is easy to use, and has a user interface that doesn't feel sluggish, I think it would sell like hotcakes.
It just seems nobody has produced this "iPad-killer" yet, so apparently it's hard to do.
What people want most of all, is something that works with the least amount of fuzz.
For example, I bought an iPhone 3GS two years ago, my colleague bought an HTC Hero around the same time. I still get updates, he needs to jailbreak his phone and mess around with custom ROMs to get the newer Android versions.
It's the same with Blizzard. They support their older games for a long time.
Care about your users and they will care about you. The problem with a lot of companies, like Microsoft and HTC, is that their customers are OEMs and telcos, not the users.
The numbers don't matter.
In 2000 I bought a Casio Cassiopeia E125 PDA: 150 MHz ARM processor, 32MB RAM, 16MB internal flash, CompactFlash slot so extendable up to 4 GB, 320x240 full color screen, PocketPC 2000 (WinCE 3.0).
I bought it because it had much better specs than the Palm V, which had a monochrome display, 16 Mhz CPU, 2MB RAM or something like that.
A friend of mine did buy the Palm. In the end it was a much better PDA than mine. It had 30x the battery life, it didn't forget all it's settings (including contacts, calender and even password), if the battery died, it had a sync utility that actually worked, and most importantly, it was usable left handed.
I wouldn't even say that Casio did a bad job, except for the battery life the hardware was pretty nice. It was just that MS PocketPC was horrible as a PDA OS, while PalmOS was done very well.
Sure someone ported DOOM and I could run it on my PDA. I could play MP3's and the Palm couldn't. but for actually using it as a PDA the Palm was much much better.
My point is. That except for a few things, like playing MP3s, decoding video, the CPU power and other specs only matter in sofar as they OS isn't tailored to the hardware specs. A well designed OS can outperform a poorly designed one on hardware that has specs only 1/10th.
The Casio E-125 was a very beefy machine in those days, but PocketPC was so poorly designed, and so resource heavy, that it still was a pain to use, while PalmOS was designed for hardware even more limited than the Palm V, and thus ran very smoothly.
It's the last time I bought something on specs alone, without having used it first.
You have to pay to be called? Someone can rack up your phone bill by repeatedly calling you? That doesn't sound right.
I am old enough to remember. But as far as I'm concerned, Java is a nice language for some serverside tasks, but still horrible for anything that needs to interact with users, unless you completely write your own UI. Swing is horrible, SWT is kind of ok-ish for some office type applications but still limited.
And any Java application I have used, has glitches in the GUI, moments where it just stops responding for a few seconds, laggy responses to user input.
The only user oriented Java application that sofar has been able to impress me is Minecraft.
Like NASA will still be funded then. I don't think NASA will make it past 2013 if even FEMA funding is in question.
The main thing actually is bandwidth.
Radioastronomy needs a lot of CPU power, but compared to other things like the stuff that uses BOINC, it needs a lot of bandwidth.
For example our current LOFAR system handles 200 Gb/s with a 12.000 core BlueGene and a ~3200 core, 200 machine cluster and about 6 PB of storage.
At full resolution we would write 2 PB per 24 hours.
With 2 million BOINC users, it would require an average stream of about 1 Mb/s per user, if each of them is online for 2.4 hours a day.
In other words, it's about the same bandwidth as all torrents in the USA combined (20% of ~1 Tb/s average USA bandwidth)
Yes. We're basically processing the same bandwidth as of all the torrents in the USA. Now we don't have the biggest BlueGene in the world. Much bigger versions have been purchased by customers not disclosed by IBM, but probably in the NSA/CIA/FBI/DHS corner, making at least a few capable of processing the internet in real time.
The BlueGene Stella at LOFAR central processing currently does 37 TFLops, which is about the same as this new Fornax system the article mentions (40 TFlops).
The Stella was a big computer in 2005 in http://science.slashdot.org/story/05/05/01/2316248/When-Lofar-Meets-Stella
Not so impressive in 2011.
It's the difference between being #6 on the supercomputer top 500, or not even making it.
And while LOFAR is running several other clusters besides the Stella, and manages to handle 200 GB/s, SKA is supposed to handle 15 TB/s or more.
In other words, this is a nice computer, but a toy compared to what SKA will need.
While space based VLBI is certainly cool, and some of the components in RadioAstron were developed at my company, it doesn't compare to the SKA.
The RadioAstron has a 10 m antenna, so about 75 m2 collecting area. The SKA will have a of about 1000000 m2. (square kilometer). The baselines will be up to 6-7000 km long in some possible variants, compared to the 189000km of the Radioastron.
So the spacial resolution might be a bit smaller (7000/189000 = 0.037), but the sensitivity is much lower (75/1000000=0.000075)
And that doesn't take into account that you can have a much larger data connection to a groundbased system, increasing the resolution in time and/or frequency, and the bandwidth you can observe.
This is exactly why I'm sticking to 3.6.
I like the UI I have. The addons I use have been updated to newer versions of FireFox. But only for Windows.
I use Linux and OSX. For Linux and OSX the latest versions are still for 3.6.
As far as I'm concerned, anything beyond 3.6 is Windows only.
Firefox used to be a nice crossplatform browser. What happened to that?
And I was thinking plugins were only broken on OSX and Linux. Apparently FireFox has become a Win32-only browser.
For a browser that started out crossplatform, that's bad.
That's why if I switch browsers, I'll go to Safari.
For now I'm stuck on Firefox 3.6, as most addons I use are still only available for that version. They are only being updated for newer FF versions for Windows.
FireFox's major selling point are the addons. The new release cycle broke those. Without addons, there is no point in choosing FF over another browser.
Yeah, this behaviour annoys me as well. I wish I could disable the Google smartsearch r what's it called as well.
I'm still on Firefox 3.6. I've tried updating, but the addons I've been using for the past5 or so years are only being updated for Windows.
I'm using Firefox because it's available on Linux and OSX as well.
The main advantage of Firefox over other browsers are the addons. Break those, and I have no reason to stay with Firefox.
I've been a user of Netscape/Phoenix/Firefox since 1995, hardly ever used anything else, but it looks like I finally have to go looking for another browser.
I don't know, but for me it's well worth it, I use it on my phone all the time, while on my desktop I sometimes don't log in for more than a month.
I have a lot of long trips in the car with friends, and being able to select and play songs on the fly has been very entertaining.
There are also CS jobs in industry and government. You might need to look for them though, as a lot are more generic programming jobs.
And I'm not talking about a Software Architect position, although someone like that might get to do some CS.
I'm talking about someone who's expected to publish in peer reviewed papers. Although you can have a CS job without having to do that.
It's the same here. We usually even speak if the "ICT sector". Just like there are Healthcare, Agriculture, Education, Government, Financial and Industrial sectors.
Or there could be an "ICT division" in a bank or R&D department.
In general it's supposed to encompass anything from the guy changing broken disks in the server room, to a telco's sales representative, to the software architect of the Government's new tax system.
Sure it's broad, but that's what you get for dividing the economy into sectors.
A little googling found this picture of the tunnel:
http://www.srpsko-dnf.com/CMS/uploaded/CERN-Switzerland-to-Grand-Sasso-730-km-tunnel-plan.jpg
What is this with people confusing the words "of" and "have"?
Unlike "their"/"they're"/"there" or "once"/"ones", the pronunciation isn't even similar.
I'm not a native speaker, can anyone explain this to me?
What do you think all those neutrino detectors were being built for? It's how you track those FTL ships. Only the military didn't think the CERN people would figure it out as well.
This is not the whole story. I know that at least in Sweden a different rotary phone system was used. With the numbers the other way around or something like that. Memories are from 25+ years ago, so a bit hazy, but I definitely remember being baffled the first time I had to use a Swedish phone.
I also know that early "Adding machines", before cash registers, also used the lowest at the bottom layout. I think it was mechanically easier to build. I still have a 100 year old one here, once used by my grandfather.
I think it's one of the key differences between Apple and MS. To MS the customers are the OEMs and corporate IT departments. To Apple the customers are the actual users.
Neither is perfect, but the difference in focus means I like my Macbook, but my IT department hates Apple's (lack of) support options. For Dell it's the other way around.
No, GPS can't give you an accurate enough time, you need some kind of atomic clock like a hydrogen maser. The GPS signal is influenced too much by the effects the ionosphere and orbital variations of the satellites have on the travel times of the signal. There are ways to compensate for those, but only to get a high accuracy in position, while losing any time accuracy.
With integrated differential dualfrequency GPS measurements you can get to 2-3 cm accuracy. This is routinely done by surveyors, although the equipment isn't cheap ($150k) and the size of a small truck.
For application in radioastronomy even higher accuracy is possible over global ranges in the 10.000+ km range in VLBI. Techniques like that are used to calibrate GPS and measure continental drift to mm accuracy.
I find it highly unlikely that an error of more than 10 cm would have been made here unless someone at some surveyor company made a stupid mistake somewhere.